When macOS High Sierra’s Content Caching Isn’t Working
Tip: have lots of iOS / Mac devices in your house? And a Mac that’s usually on? Turn on “Content Caching” in Sharing prefs, and updates will be downloaded to all your devices from your Mac, saving time and bandwidth.
(This used to be a macOS Server-only feature, but no more! The best part is zero configuration is needed on all of your devices — they’ll automatically find and go to your local Content Cache first.)
(Also there are some hard-core settings probably useful to someone if you option-click the, er, Options… button.)
Incidentally a great way to nab the IPAs for platforms like tvOS
It’s nice in theory. Unclear that it works in practice. (Like 80% of what Apple ships these days: buggy? broken design?)
I’ve been monitoring it across a few updates (OS and XCode) and as far as I can tell it works for El Capitan clients (!?) but NOT for High Sierra Clients…
However, shortly after I wrote the column noted above, content caching stopped working for me.
[…]
I decided to solve this, and found a detailed article explaining the command line tool AssetCacheManagerUtil, which offers more controls than those found in the preference pane.
[…]
When you select a different drive to store the cache, that drive has to have the folder:
/Library/Application Support/Apple/AssetCache/DataIf it doesn’t exist? It stalls. This seems like a foolish testing error on Apple’s part: no message explains what’s going on, and there’s no text or other information that tells you a particular folder has to be on the destination volume you’re choosing for caching.
